latent power of these unexercised rights. If the political power of the
Negro was a nullity because of his ignorance and lack of leadership, why
were they not content to leave it so, with the pleasing assurance that if
it ever became effective, it would be because the Negroes had grown fit
for its exercise? On the contrary, they have not rested until the
possibility of its revival was apparently headed off by new State
Constitutions. Nor are they satisfied with this. There is no doubt that an
effort will be made to secure the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, and
thus forestall the development of the wealthy and educated Negro, whom the
South seems to anticipate as a greater menace than the ignorant ex-slave.
However improbable this repeal may seem, it is not a subject to be lightly
dismissed; for it is within the power of the white people of the nation to
do whatever they wish in the premises--they did it once; they can do it
again. The Negro and his friends should see to it that the white majority
shall never wish to do anything to his hurt. There still stands, before
the Negro-hating whites of the South, the specter of a Supreme Court
which will interpret the Constitution to mean what it says, and what those
who enacted it meant, and what the nation, which ratified it, understood,
and which will find power, in a nation which goes beyond seas to
administer the affairs of distant peoples, to enforce its own fundamental
laws; the specter, too, of an aroused public opinion which will compel
Congress and the Courts to preserve the liberties of the Republic, which
are the liberties of the people. To wilfully neglect the suffrage, to hold
it lightly, is to tamper with a sacred right; to yield it for anything
else whatever is simply suicidal. Dropping the element of race,
disfranchisement is no more than to say to the poor and poorly taught,
that they must relinquish the right to defend themselves against
oppression until they shall have become rich and learned, in competition
with those already thus favored and possessing the ballot in addition.
This is not the philosophy of history. The growth of liberty has been the